Sometimes the online world reveals unsuspected parallel dimensions. This is an unknown restyle of Neural independently (and secretly as we never knew about it) made by NY-based Motion and Graphic Designer, Clarke Blackham. Very nicely made, perhaps only a bit glossier for the magazine’s line, it testifies once more how even your most familiar outcomes can have another life somewhere else.

The value of craft after software sounds rampant sometimes, expressing the freedom of escaping repetitive taps and clicks to accomplish some assumed tasks. Mixing media, electricity, electronics, mechanics and inert objects Graham Dunning has realised a structured track/performance/open script in his “Mechanical Techno: Ghost in the Machine Music.” More than a proof of concept a machine music declination.

Isn’t ASCII Art a perfect form of “graffiti” in 2010s? The 8-bit aesthetics is among the strongest visual references connecting the analogue recent past with the omni-digital present, so why not adopt it to finally have some public art embedded in the present? In Varberg, Sweden, 2016, the GOTO80 crew (feat: Karin Andersson) did it, choosing (not by accident) the Mo Soul Amiga-font.

The relationship between Andy Warhol and personal computers (becoming quite popular during his last years) has been only partially investigated beyond his Amiga works. In November 2015, Sotheby’s sold his “Apple (from Ads)” (acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas) for 910.000 USD, and in catalogue’s notes Warhol tells about his meeting with Steve Jobs insisting to give him one and showing him how to draw (even if still in black and white): “we went into Sean [John Lennon’s son]’s bedroom–and there was a kid there setting up the Apple computer that Sean had gotten as a present, the Macintosh model. I said that once some man had been calling me a lot wanting to give me one, but that I’d never called him back or something, and then the kid looked up and said, ‘Yeah, that was me. I’m Steve Jobs.’ And he looked so young, like a college guy. And he told me that he would still send me one now. And then he gave me a lesson on drawing with it. It only comes in black and white now, but they’ll make it soon in color…I felt so old and out of it with this young whiz guy right there who helped invent it.”

Minority Report comes closer… Three huge screens at Birmingham New Street railway station are scanning passers-by and play advertisements accordingly. http://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/new-street-station-advertising-screens-9920400

Muon, animated speakers

Put together the Welsh designer Ross Lovergrove, KEF (a leading English company in the production of acoustic technology) and Moving Brands (the company that employs, among others, the multimedia artist Chris O’Shea), blend everything in that powerful blender that is the Salone del Mobile in Milan, and put the result in the Sala del Cenacolo in the National Science and Technology Museum. You will get a suprising ‘liquid experience’, to quote Lovergrove himself. Liquid as a shake, that is, and, indeed, this is a real sensory shake where the eighteenth century fresco paintings melt with the reverberations that two (two meters tall) aluminum speakers diffuse thanks to their organic shape (and the reflecting surface). However, the Moun (this is the name of the speakers) experience couldn’t be truly synaestetic if it didn’t involve the sense of hearing as well. O’Shea solved this problem by creating an interaction between the monochromatic lights cast on the structures, the intensity of the audio inputs and the flashes of colored light synced to the music. Thus, the sound, thanks to some frequency and peak sensors, influences the reactions of the volumetric light which, in turn, creates a relation between the visuals reflected on the speakers and the movement of the shadows in the room. The installation is composed by a huge screen (10×5 meters) resting on the floor and made of 73,728 colored LEDs. The screen was built by Creative Technologies while the LEDs are controlled by O’Shea with a Barco MiTrix system. If we put these two companies into the blender, too, we’d have the typical mix of design, high-tech and creativity that has always been the hallmark of the Salone del Mobile in Milan. After all, this product visually animates the sound not according to its structure (as it happens in VJing), but according to how they’re ‘physically’ reproduced, with the speakers, which are brought back to the center of the stage to legitimize their strategic and functional role.